After voting to hold rates steady at its monthly meeting today (Thursday), European Central Bank (ECB) President Jean-Claude Trichet said a rate hike in July is “possible.”

The news on the UK economy just keeps getting worse. Last week’s news was unremittingly glum – from falling house prices to income squeezes, most of us are quite a bit worse off than we were a year ago.

When the gold standard was abandoned and fiat money became the only game in town, the economy may have been set up to take a huge fall. Can human beings really be so bold as to think they can control the value and worth of a country’s money?

With the London Stock Exchange closed and the Office for National Statistics shut, yesterday’s rainy Bank holiday Monday provided the perfect chance for us to look back at three stories that astounded us last week – but which somehow escaped without comment at the time.

Just because an economist or a central banker says something, it doesn’t make it so.

It was the usual doom and gloom when I opened the paper this morning. The Bank of England predicts a protracted slowdown. It’s revised its growth forecast for next year to 1.5%, down from a 2009 forecast of 2.8% made last year.

Crude Hits $133; Time Warner Spins Off Cable Unit; Boeing Jettisons 750 Workers; UBS Sells Assets to BlackRock; American Airlines’ Desperate Moves; Moody’s Big Mistake; DOJ to Sue OPEC?; BOE Holds on Inflation Fears.

Amidst all the furore regarding the Labour administration’s embarrassingly mis-managed tax shortcomings, the cries of those in the UK warning of a growing humanitarian crisis in the developing world have been lost.

Like the cast of a bad sitcom, the stars of the credit crunch are reuniting.

The U.S. economy is in a recession, and the over-leveraged U.S. consumer won’t be able to ride to the rescue as they have in the past. And I don’t expect the stimulus checks to help much either, as they are way too little too late.